By Ruth Whittington Remember last month’s exhortation to break the firewalls between health economics and sales and marketing? Here is an opposing view from a prominent member of the industry, who believes those firewalls have a real value in certain situations – particularly when dealing with the managed care market in the US. His point…
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By David Woods Nothing is calculated to agitate health economists more than the perception that what you do is somehow inexact, or “soft”. Yet no matter how precise and rigorous the recommendations you make to decision-makers in the pharmaceutical industry, there’s a lingering perception that they’re designed to justify financial preconceptions. So even if your…
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By David Woods, former editor At a recent meeting on healthcare communications, one speaker referred to what he called new innovations. Perhaps his enthusiasm made up for a lack of linguistic acuity, for clearly innovation is by definition new. After all, the word itself contains the Latin novus . Nonetheless, innovation – defined in my…
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By Ruth Whittington ([email protected]) One of the issues most frequently mentioned when we surveyed you was the seemingly unbridgeable gap between how health economists think, and how marketing and sales people think. As a communications agency that specialises in strategy for health economics we see this time and time again. Passive resistance, or incomprehension at…
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George Orwell, whose prose was spare and pure, offered six rules for effective writing: * Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never use a long word where a short one will do. * If it is possible to cut a word out,…
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By David Woods, editor Before embarking upon this project we wanted to get a solid grip on the issues that keep you awake at night … and how we can help resolve them. So we asked several US and UK health economists, and found that insomnia appears to be an occupational hazard on both sides…
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In the current pharmaceutical environment your work is of paramount importance. However, if it’s communicated poorly, and those who need it can’t use it, what value does it really have? How do you make health economics understandable to clinicians? Health economics and outcomes research are vital in product development, subsequent approval, marketing and eventual market…
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